Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Old Poem: Get Out of Your Chair! (2007)

More old stuff! This was inspired by a former roommate (I mean I can be a couch potato sometimes, but this guy was permanently on the sofa). I think I might have written this for a poetry slam, but never performed it (and I know a lot of people slam on slams, but they're a hell of a lot of fun to do).

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Get out of your chair!
What are you sitting there for?
Telling your fat cells to make more fat cell babies?
Telling yourself tomorrow, always tomorrow?
While today is already slipping away?

Well tomorrow came yesterday, sweetheart!
So get off your fat ass
Put your arms on the arms of your chair
And PUSH!

Come on, try harder, you can do!
Gravity may be a relentless master,
But you can get your butt out of that depression.
Lift those cheeks!

Put weight on your legs, and blood in your brain
Your feet are there to move you to do
The great things you knew you could
When you were little and growing

Did you mean to grow into that?
Into that divet in that sagging chair?
Did you mean to stare at a flickering box
For hours endless
Saliva collecting at the corners of your mouth?

I don't get it.

Is it the reality shows that suck you in?
The succubi that seduce you
With the lightly scripted lives of other schmoes
Who you think you could be
If only, if only? ... If only!

Or is it the sitcoms,
With their nauseatingly attractive nuclear families
Playing out their thirty minute crisis of the week
On a stage with a sofa
And a staircase that leads to nowhere.
But you already know where nowhere is, don't you?

Or maybe it is the cop dramas
With two bodies per episode
And if there are three, then one isn't really dead
How many times have you sat there and seen that?

Why do you sit there?
Feeding your brain a bare minimum diet
While your body slowly conforms
To the shape of a badly upholstered object?

That could only be torture to me.
Life is out there,
Not in here.
Get out of your chair.

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